Get out your grow-bags! A wake-up call for gardeners everywhere

AN ARTIST IN THE GARDEN BY TESSA NEWCOMB AND JASON GATHORNE-HARDY (Full Circle Editions £25)

Prince Charles displayed his understanding and love of gardens when he wrote: ‘For many, the creation of a garden, or the care and nurturing of a garden, is of far greater significance than gardening itself’.

In other words, just about anyone can pull a weed or dig over a bed, but getting in touch with the spirit of a garden is an art.

This is not rarefied idealism. Gardening programmes have never been so popular, and in this time of economic uncertainty and generalised woe there are waiting lists for allotments.

The comforting rhythms of gardening, the fight against pests, the rewards for labour… you don’t have to search to find metaphors for life itself. Although not everybody can own a walled kitchen garden like that at Highgrove, grow-bags and pots on a balcony can give inestimable delight and satisfaction to the person who tends them.

Such a spirit of delight runs through this pretty book - not a coffee-table tome, but an elegant blend of text and paintings, celebrating one year in a Suffolk walled garden. Glemham House (in the Alde Valley) is the family seat of the aristocratic writer, artist and farmer Jason Gathorne-Hardy, who invited the popular Suffolk artist Tessa Newcomb to spend a year painting it through the seasons. The result is a book which simultaneously manages to pay attention to the finest detail of plants and insects and to paint, in broad strokes, the bigger picture of why it all matters. It is a history of a particular landscape, a family, a house and a garden and a celebration of the smallest daily events - all rolled into one.

70:

Number of plants used in a 16th Century kitchen, including nettles, wild garlic and dandelions

The two-acre walled garden dates from the 1820s, and in the 19th century it fed up to 30 staff, family members and visitors at any one time. The lovely bird’s eye drawing which forms the book’s endpapers helps the reader to understand the descriptions in the text.

By the end of the book you feel you have actually visited this much-loved and well-worked paradise yourself.

A wonderful mix of gardening lore, history, art and recipes, An Artist In The Garden is also very useful - if you want to learn how to make a pheasant casserole or leek and potato gratin, and discover Suffolk dialect, monthly garden tasks, recipes using weeds and advice on seeds. The author is himself an accomplished artist and (having looked up his work online) I confess to a preference for his lively, free-flowing, detailed drawings of animals and birds (sadly absent from this volume), rather than Tessa Newcomb’s decorative painting which very occasionally errs on the side of greetings-card sweetness. She is an excellent colourist though, and the prevailing mood of this book is one of vibrant optimism - a singing blend of word and image. Tessa Newcomb’s own diary-type words prefix each month-chapter like exquisite little poems, and I could have done with more of her words, perhaps about the paintings.

In a sense the whole book is an elegy for a way of life that is passing, as well as one that’s already passed. Gathorne-Hardy reminds us that the work of man has been made all-but redundant by the rotavator and strimmer, while the real knowledge of timber that countrymen once took for granted is now rare. There’s an important sense in which this book acts - in the gentlest of ways - as a wake-up call, warning that unless we take care of the greater garden which is the natural world we share, it will be gone forever. And that care must be painstaking, with no quick fixes.

As Tessa Newcomb says, ‘I see this walled garden as from a satellite. A circle of time is held within it while the rest of the world moves on.’

This lovely book reminds us that, as the cycles of nature turn, and we too grow old and die, we are only the custodians of the world we inhabit, and must be humbly grateful for it.